I have been taking P.E. 138 (Basic Fitness) this summer, and I can tell you that your daily workouts are ridiculous --unless you hope to become a weight-lifting champion before Christmas. I am definitely not an expert on this subject, but there are a few tips I can give you that you seem to need.

1. "Some activity is better than none."

You do not have to set Olympic-level goals in order to become more active and fit. According to the U.S. Department of Health, it is recommended to get a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate activity per week. This is not as hard as it sounds. If you went for a 30-minute brisk walk three times a week, you would have already worked out for 90 minutes. (I may be over-simplifying this, but hopefully you understand.)

2. Working out every day will hurt you.

Doing certain types of exercises too frequently can injure you. You need to give your body time to rest. Summon me back to this thread so I can explain this in more detail.

3. Warm up before stretching.

It is actually harmful to stretch before exercising. Stretching your muscles when they are "cold" puts unnecessary strain on them and could lead to injuries. Do some warm ups before you stretch. Getting the blood flowing will reduce your chances of injury.

This should be plenty from me for the time being. I am trying to get myself into a habit of regularly exercising. Perhaps we can try to motivate each other. If you are going to make this a blog, I suggest you have this thread moved to the Blogs sub forum of the Your Forum.

I am still thinking about it. I would LOVE to take your P.E class. The one I took at my college has us running 3 or 4 miles everyday towards the end of the semester. Perhaps my gym teacher should go back to school. Motivation is something that I desperately need. It seems that I have it less and less each day. Perhaps I can get my loved ones in on this as well.

Ebony_umbreon12 : What kind of P.E. class were you taking? I can imagine having to walk 3 or 4 miles everyday, but running them seems a bit excessive for someone who is only looking to lose a little weight.

I would encourage you to find a partner in real life more than getting motivation from me. When you have a real life friend with you, you have someone that can exercise with you, challenge you to push yourself (while being careful not to over-exert yourself), and vice verses.

Jumping back to my second point in my previous reply, my teacher explained to us about five different areas of fitness; 1) cardiorespiratory endurance, 2) muscle strength, 3) muscle endurance, 4) flexibility, and 5) body composition. Each area ought to be done with its own frequency. After going back to my textbook, I realized that I was a bit wrong with my point in the precious post. Muscle strength is the only area you need to avoid training on consecutive days.

To help me explain what ought to be done and how frequently, here is a physical activity pyramid. While this is not as precise as the one from my text book, this should get things going.


At the bottom you see moderate-intensity physical activity. These are your everyday tasks such as cleaning the house and climbing the stairs. The next step up is cardio. What you see is correct, and to add to this my text book says 20-60 minutes a day. muscle strength and flexibility training both should be done 2-3 days per week. As I said before, muscle strength should not be done on consecutive days. Give yourself at least one day of area for that area. Flexibiltiy, on the other hand, is ideally done for 5-7 days per week.

One last thing. You should still seek help from a professional more than form me since I am only a student who is still learning to form the habits.

I think that if you are doing all that properly you could very well be overdoing it. In fact you ARE overdoing it- I am an amateur weight trainer myself and if you don't ease up a bit your likely to get overtraining syndrome. Which is basically where you have exercise so much that your body becomes frantic trying to repair all the muscles and drops the "unnecessary" function of immunity. In English you can literally exercise yourself sick. Also the more strenuous and rigid your exercise routine is the less likely you are to actually stick to it.

On repairing the muscles your body is not repairing what you might think of as an injury but small microscopic tears that are made in the muscle fibers- the process of creating tiny tears in muscle by exercising and then resting while your body heals the muscle (by making more muscle) is what strength training is all about.

You need to let your body rest 1 day in between, you can exercise on that day but your schedule would look more like:

Day 1
Exercises
Day 2
Yoga
Day3
Exercises
Day 4
Yoga

Nothing is worse than when you have gotten into the routine, your doing well only to fall ill and not be able to exercise for a week.

IT IS NOT A GOOD IDEA TO EXERCISE WHILE YOU ARE SICK